Environmental Protection
America spends over $20bn per year on fossil fuel subsidies
Aug 1st
America spends over $20bn per year on fossil fuel subsidies. Abolish them
While we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, America is giving the fossil fuel industry billions to extract more
Dana Nuccitelli
Mon 30 Jul 2018
“The OCI report noted that the Obama administration actually proposed to eliminate 60% of federal fossil fuel industry subsidies, but that proposal went nowhere for one obvious reason:
In the 2015-2016 election cycle oil, gas, and coal companies spent $354 million in campaign contributions and lobbying and received $29.4 billion in federal subsidies in total over those same years – an 8,200% return on investment.”
Congress Gives Sacred Apache Land to Foreign Mining Company
Jul 30th
Congress Gives Sacred Apache Land to Foreign Mining Company
San Carlos Apache Leader Seeks Senate Defeat of Copper Mine on Sacred Land
http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2014/12/congress-gives-sacred-apache-land-to.html
“Congress is poised to give a foreign mining company 2,400 acres of national forest in Arizona that is cherished ancestral homeland to Apache natives. Controversially, the measure is attached to annual legislation that funds the US Defense Department.”
The Climate Change Denial Industry
Jul 30th
The Climate Change Denial Industry
“ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change – eight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial, the Guardian has learned.”
“Last week Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute wrote that the Earth’s carrying capacity for humanity is not fixed. Apparently, we’re living in a magical world that is immune to ecological laws.
As you might imagine, I disagree.
My response to his article was published today in Undark Magazine.
https://undark.org/article/ted-nordhaus-carrying-capacity-ecology/
What warning signs would you expect to see if we humans were pressing at the limits of global carrying capacity? Resource depletion? Check. Pollution? Check. Dying oceans? Check.” Richard Heinberg
Sky: Further – The Breakthrough Institute’s Inconvenient History with Al Gore
April 14, 2014, by Paul D. Thacker
“While sometimes functioning as shadow universities, think tanks have been exposed as quasi lobbying organizations, with little funding transparency. Recent research has also pointed out that think tanks suffer from a lack of intellectual rigor. A case in point is the Breakthrough Institute run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which describes itself as a “progressive think tank.”
https://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/breakthrough-institutes-inconvenient-history-al-gore
The evidence speaks for itself
Nov 18th
Native News Online.net
BY LEVI RICKERT / CURRENTS / 18 NOV 2017
“The evidence speaks for itself.”
“EAGLE BUTTE, SOUTH DAKOTA – American Indian tribes have opposed the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline since it was announced. The tribes have longed fear the danger of oil leaks which are inevitable.
After the existing Keystone oil pipeline leaked 210,000 gallons of oil on Thursday, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazer released the following statement:
On November 16, 2017, the existing Keystone pipeline spilled more than 210,000 gallons of Alberta tar sands crude oil within miles of the Lake Traverse Sioux, our sister Tribe. This was the third pipeline spill in the State of South Dakota this year alone. It was also the largest Keystone spill to date in South Dakota. I condemn this oil spill, the company that built this pipeline and anybody associated with it. The evidence speaks for itself.”
The Preamble of the Declaration Opposing Oil Sands Expansion
Aug 8th
The Preamble of the Declaration Opposing Oil Sands Expansion and the Construction of the Keystone-XL Pipeline. Signed 17 May, 2017 in Calgary, Alberta
“We, The First People, were and remain the stewards of the land and with this Declaration renew our vow to carry that sacred obligation in defense of our Mother, the Earth, and all born of her body and nurtured at her breast who are no longer heard amidst the dissonance of industrialization and corporate domination.”
Scientists warn pulling carbon out of the air
May 24th
The Washington Post By Chelsea Harvey May 22, 2017
“But for years, scientists have discussed the idea of going further by using large plantations full of fast-growing, carbon-storing trees to pull extra carbon emissions out of the atmosphere, a strategy sometimes called “afforestation.” But the amount of land and other resources this strategy would require to actually help us meet our global climate goals — namely, keeping global temperatures within at least two degrees of their pre-industrial levels — is completely impractical, according to Boysen’s new study in the journal Earth’s Future, and would require the destruction of huge amounts of natural ecosystems or productive agricultural land.”
“Every year an area of rainforest the size of New Jersey is cut down and destroyed.” Rainforest Information for Kids
In the first place, there are very few, maybe none at all, of Earth’s ecosystems that could be called “natural.” The human footprint is vast and indelible. Of course planting trees will not reverse or “fix” the problem because, obviously, forest destruction has been in progress for a few thousand years. Today, we are just finishing it off. However, mitigating efforts of this kind are sorely needed.
God forbid that we should reforest marginal agricultural land and limit our numbers! We have accepted our need for financial budgets, why not a population budget? Why does the US need to plough up wilderness areas, parks and arid lands for exports? The US exported 5.4 billion dollars’ worth of wheat in 2016. In the US the major food supply channels are entirely under the control of multinationals now and they export the same item with one hand and import it with the other depending on where the greatest profits lie. Forbes reports that the US crude oil exports hit record levels in 2016, despite a decline in U.S. oil production. No wonder the number of billionaires in the world increased by 13% in 2017 and the US is home to most of them.
“Boysen and her colleagues find the land space that would be required for the amount of trees necessary to keep temperatures within a 2-degree threshold under our current climate trajectory could have “dire consequences for food production or the biosphere.” And even under more optimistic scenarios, where future carbon emissions are lower and fewer trees would be necessary, they conclude that “’high inputs of managed water and fertilizers would be needed in order to avoid fierce competition for land — with potentially negative side-effects for climate and society.’”
Obviously human food is limited in a forest. But, where and what is “dire” for the biosphere about substituting a largely mono-cropped and ploughed up ecosystem which favours more humans and almost eliminates other animals with trees? After all, life here on Earth is NOT all about humans, is it? For me, this article suggests that keeping supermarkets in the western world fully stocked is more important than keeping the planet healthy.
“Converting land on this staggering scale would pit climate change responses against food security and biodiversity protection,” they write. “Massively expanding managed land for CDR [carbon dioxide removal] could crash through the planetary boundary for sustainable land use.”
“There are other options,” she said, such as more sustainable agriculture techniques, that can help make a dent in global carbon emissions. “But the most important option is, of course, not to release the CO2 into the atmosphere.”
No, the best option is to cut down on population.
Trees are Vital to our Continued Existence
May 21st
Agony of Mother Earth (I) The Unstoppable Destruction of Forests
By Baher Kamal
http://www.ipsnews.net/2017/05/agony-of-mother-earth-i-the-unstoppable-destruction-of-forests/
“This is the first of a two-part series on how humankind has been systematically destroying world’s forests—the real lungs of Mother Earth. Part II will deal with forest depletion for wood-fuel.”
Agony of Mother Earth (II) World’s Forests Depleted for Fuel
By Baher Kamal
http://www.ipsnews.net/2017/05/agony-of-mother-earth-ii-worlds-forests-depleted-for-fuel/
“This is the second of a two-part series on how humankind has been systematically destroying world’s forests—the real lungs of Mother Earth. Part I dealt with the relentless destruction of forests.”
It is the destruction of forests and the drying up of Savannah that prevents the Earth from recovering from the exponential increase of greenhouses gasses, especially methane and carbon dioxide. Without a doubt, it is the continuing greed expressed by the corporate Gods of growth and profit that maintains the ethics and laws that reinforce the ecocide and strongly resists efforts to cooperate with the planet’s ability to self-regulate. We are faced with the enemy within that we have so far been unable to subdue. With the US containing 41% of the world’s dollar millionaires and the number of worldwide billionaires increasing by double digits yearly, who can deny that there is little hope? Money talks.
Satellite Data Caught Gulf Oil Companies Hiding Enormous Oil Spills
May 1st
An organization called SkyTruth is monitoring drilling companies for drastically underestimating the amount of oil they spill into the ocean.
How Satellite Data Caught Gulf Oil Companies Hiding Enormous Oil Spills
“There’s no doubt there are a lot more accidents than we know about.” [Photo: courtesy Gulf Monitoring Consortium via SkyTruth]
BY LAUREN ZANOLLI04.27.17 | 6:30 AM
“To find a more independent estimate of the scope of daily oil spills, the report’s authors drew on an analysis of that same NRC data by SkyTruth, a nonprofit that uses satellite imagery—mainly from the European Space Agency, one of the few free resources—to monitor the environmental effects of industrial activity. Using SkyTruth’s numbers, report authors say the total amount of oil spilled in the northern Gulf last year was closer to 875,000 gallons, or about 50 times larger than official estimates.”
Life on Earth is not all about Humans
Aug 26th
No, this you will not do!
“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources,” Roosevelt acknowledged in 1908, before adding, rather presciently: “But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.” Theodore Roosevelt
I’ve known for years that it was just a matter of time before the government set about pillaging citizen assets in the name of the God of profits for the few. I’m deeply saddened to realise that this is truly an eventuality. Even sadder is the knowing that this eventuality will become reality. When will the hundreds of thousands of people who love Nature speak out and proclaim “No, this you will not do!”
An analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP) https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/report/2016/04/11/135044/the-rise-to-power-of-the-congressional-anti-parks-caucus/
has found that between January 2013 and March 2016, rightwing members of Congress filed at least 44 bills or amendments designed to undermine or water down protections for national parks.
A core group of 20 members of Congress, many of them Tea Party members, are part of what CAP calls an “anti-parks caucus” gripped by an implacable hostility to public lands.
The wider Republican party is receptive to this position – its official 2016 platform states: “Congress should reconsider whether parts of the federal government’s enormous landholdings and control of water in the west could be better used for ranching, mining or forestry through private ownership.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/23/national-parks-100th-birthday-political-threats
So Nature is no longer Natural?
Jun 11th
The Washington Post
Scientists say that ‘nature,’ untouched by humans, is now almost entirely gone
By Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis June 6
Please have a look at the 18 photos toward the end of the article.
All but one of these photos reflect what humans, no room for doubt, nothing to be sceptical about, have done and are continuing to do to Earth. Has Economism replaced our traditional religions?
See:
CES Musings
Chronicling the Transition from Economic-Industrial
To Ecological-Cultural Societies (May-June 2016)
Richard Norgaard, “The Church of Economism and its Discontents”